After The Interlude

“I loved each page of this work”

— Amazon Review

“A book about the soul, from the soul. A word of hope, of better understanding our Way and our connection with the Universe”

— Amazon Review

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Book excerpt

PREAMBLE

Every soul on this Planet has come here to undertake a unique Solitary Journey.  That Journey is to be worked out through the body and personality that the soul inhabits and surrounds.  There is a congenital problem of sorts with this Truth.

This problem results from the Process of Forgetfulness we undergo as we make our way here.  In essence, we become separate from our souls.  I, as the newborn baby, know nothing of this new world.  I arrive possessing nothing, but, as Wordsworth said, “trailing clouds of glory”.  My new life and beginning personality are in the hands of the parents, caregivers and forces that will shape me.  And, within the deep recesses of my being, my soul slumbers on, waiting, like the frogs and princesses of the fairy tales and fables I will soon hear, to be awakened to the truth and beauty of who I actually am.

The ultimate important choice we make in life, then, is to pay attention with all of our senses to the irrepressible nudges of our forgotten soul and to take this solitary journey, the journey to and of the soul.  The penultimate choice we must make is to discover our souls.  Some personalities never uncover their souls, and thus wander through life.  Other personalities become highly actualized and connected.  Many of us find ourselves on a point on the continuum between oblivion and hyper-awareness.  And, while no two journeys are the same, the intersection of journeying souls is a critical occurrence.  It is at the intersections that we meet our soul mates.

On this journey, the soul remembers.  It calls out for attention.  If we don't give it the attention that it needs, the stimulus will come knocking at the door when we are most available and most vulnerable.  The solution, the healing, is simple and difficult.  It rests in that core paradox of the marriage of loss and abundance.

In embracing the "enemy", in mourning our losses and loving ourselves, we are brought to the unexpected and enigmatic reward of contentment and internal reconciliation.  It is through the inward wordlessness of personal reconciliation that the soul is permanently located.

There is no logic, nor order, to loss and grief, joy and abundance.  And so, the story of any solitary journey is not an orderly one.  What is stored in the cells has no sense of time.  And often it has no sense of propriety.

CREDO

(Ellyn)

To a friend:

What’s a footprint?

It’s how much space it takes on the floor.  The term is used figuratively in a variety of technical fields.  For instance, a satellite’s footprint is the area of the globe that its signal covers.

Ah, I see… then what is the soul’s footprint?

I believe we are bathed in light.  I believe it to be Original.  How do I understand that Original?  For me, in my limited capabilities of understanding and giving words, it’s prudent to say simply that the light is God, the Original.  More words would obfuscate and distort essential meaning.  I see evidence of this light in chaos theory and quantum physics and their relationships to astronomy—fractals, dimensions, time, creation, the codes and complexities of DNA, supernovas, the governing Mind-Force, how It gives birth (in a multitude of ways) unceasingly, the vague edges of the permutations and combinations, and the film that blocks me from revelation and entry.  I’ve been there, though.  And I’m going back.  At the end of my soul’s journey, I’ll slip through that now invisible, impenetrable membrane and return home.  No more glimpses… although they’re the cartographic tools for the understanding and perception that map our way home.  Glimpses take us to the precipice of meaning in a very powerful way.

When I was two years old, my recollections of home took hold in my speech.  I had questions, big questions.  I suspect that’s the time each of us moves away from our womb-language and begins the earthly trek.  This stage of acuity for me was reinforced by mother-teachings.  During my formative years, my most eccentric of mothers expounded on weighty matters I happened to fall in love with—mathematics, patterns, antediluvianism, ESP, Edgar Cayce, music, the fourth dimension, Esperanto, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Bach, the Dalai Lama, Atlantis and more.  While she eventually sank into the anguish, the estrangement of the prodigy, she gave me great gifts in her dissertations, and I gobbled them up.  I suppose one might view this as, “But what else is there to do on the Canadian prairies during the long, bleak winter?”

By the way, our womb-language is, I believe, our soul language.  Its disappearance is our first great loss.  The departure of the memory of home is our second.

While my childhood was spent in the painful state of the introvert, which included for me a sense of dislocation, I received solace in questing.  By the time secondary school came my way, my fascination with origins grew deep roots, thanks to the waters of physics, mathematics, literature and scripture.  (Devotion to Bible stories became more intellectual.  I’m not sure this is a good thing.)  The seedbed became prepared for plantings on parallel universes, the winking energy of other universes, symmetry, super-symmetry, dimensions beyond four, senses beyond five, vibrating strings, membranes and brains conceiving brains.

In the alchemy of the passage of years, I’ve come to believe these things:

1.               If God’s Mind = the Universe; I = Am.

2.               All the words we have for heaven, eternal life, origins, the land of forms and others of similar ilk can be covered in the massive blanket of the concept of the Original, our Elsewhere Home, that rumbles around inside our guts like the far-off thunder over Lake Huron.  (Many call this anxiety and remain lost in the maze of self-help books, psychotherapy and intense individualism or repetition compulsion.)

3.               We chose to come Here from Elsewhere.

4.               We have a purpose to find, healing to carry out and Soulwork to do.

5.               We forget our beginnings as we learn to talk in Earthspeak.

6.               We feel the call to remember throughout our adulthood via dim, non-verbal, cellular memories, and we look for meaning from the position of the ego and not the soul.

7.               We name this call Emptiness, the Abyss, Longing to Belong, Why, Homesickness, Quest, Thirst... until we begin to embrace it and identify it as the prompting of our soul.

8.               The massive force we call God is the Master Brain of the universe whose creative power is Love.

9.               This love is better called Intent.

10.            We are unconditionally loved by the Almighty Power.

11.            We are personally accountable for our lives, no matter how we got to be where we are.

12.            We must “work out our own salvation in fear and trembling.”

13.            All our answers lie within us.

14.            We dream our lives into being.

15.            We are capable of great creativity.

16.            When we die to this life, we are free and return to our Original.

17.            Most importantly, I believe that if we contemplate and accept our own death, we are liberated from the unholy grips of the archenemy, Fear.

As some foundation for this exploration on the oddly charted waters of the life of the soul, I suggest four concepts for our archeological handbook:

THE SOUL: Descriptions of the soul are best done in the first person.  My soul comes from the eternal, the world of forms, and will return to the eternal when I have no more need for this physical encumbrance I call my body.  My soul is my connection to divinity.  Whenever I feel divinity within me, I feel it within my soul.  My soul is my eternal essence.  It is who I truly am, which is often overlooked by me.  My core force is my soul, the part of me that understands everything.  It remains available to me and will not become active without permission.  My soul is also not constrained by nor contained within my body.  Rather, I live within my soul, and have the capability of touching and joining another’s soul.  My soul is also the massive love that connects me to the divine, to health and to the universe.  The essence of me that calls out to goodness, beauty and truth, if I will allow it to, is my soul.  It is that currently invisible, dynamic essence of me that creates, is poetical, does not age and that leads me to the arms and lap of the holiest Being.

SOULMATE: A soulmate is someone whose soul matches with mine in a discovered, alive and explicit way.  The connection is not contrived and not accidental, even though there appear to be “coincidences” that led up to the connection.  Soul-mates cannot destroy their connection without abandoning the life of their own souls.  Soul-mates are on the same life-journey and perhaps were companions of some sort before they came to this life-journey.  Soul-mates recognize each other and their relationship as “beyond,” incredibly deep and mysterious.  Soul-mates “know” each other in a way that defies description.  By necessity, one cannot know many soulmates; three or four would seem to be an optimal number.  (Not to be confused with soulmate, there is also the soul-friend.  This is a person with whom I connect deeply at a spiritual level but who does not dwell with me in the totality of my life-journey.  A soul-friend has his or her own few soul-mates and a separate-from-mine life-journey.  And, a soul-friend understands.)

SOULPOD: A soul-pod is that group of people with whom one connects as soul-mates and soul-friends.  A soul-pod is recognized by its members.

A RETREAT: A retreat is a place, imaginary or real, where I travel with my soul for restoration and growth.  There can be up to four soul-mates on the retreat.  There can also be simply and beautifully only one soul on the retreat.  (Doubtless, there are other souls on any retreat, souls without any physical manifestation, but with a presence, if we will only truly listen.  At my retreat, Spindrift on Lake Huron, there are visitations through birds and the skies.)  The location needs to emanate from the principles of simplicity and familiarity and must fit with what the souls involved need to emerge and take over.  The epiphanal locating of a retreat takes time and requires careful, respectful, quiet approaches until it has a life and soul of its own.

These concepts become clearer and clearer the more we remember and place our life journey in the context of C. S. Lewis’s words:

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.